GOP climate tack: Talk jobs, not science

Republican leaders have a clear strategy for combating President Barack Obama’s climate agenda: Don’t talk about the science.

Just as top Republicans have called for their party to rebrand itself by avoiding rhetoric that alienates minorities, young voters and women, key GOP lawmakers are trying to stay out of the long-running debate about whether global warming is real — a discussion that has often included biblical references or claims that scientists are committing a giant hoax.

“I think you have to focus on the American economy,” said Sen. John Barrasso, the fourth-ranking Senate Republican, while responding Wednesday to a reporter’s question about climate science. “The costs of the regulations are real. And the benefits are unknown.”

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) similarly danced around a science question Wednesday during a question-and-answer session with reporters.

“Well, our argument with the president right now is he’s picking winners and losers, he’s harming innovation and there’s going to be a direct assault” on jobs, McCarthy said when asked whether Republicans want to debate climate science.

The jobs-centric rhetoric is no accident, GOP consultant Mike McKenna said — although he noted that many Republicans won’t go along with that approach.

“This is a strategy that leadership wants to take, leadership wants to take, especially in the House,” McKenna said. “Rank and file are perfectly willing to talk about the underlying science.”

And so are Democrats like Obama, who are eager to paint Republicans as the anti-science party. “We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society,” the president said Tuesday during his climate policy address at Georgetown University.

A day later, Barrasso rebutted Obama by turning to jobs.

“He kind of talked about the Flat Earth Society,” the Wyoming senator said. “You know, we have a very flat economy and it’s because of the president’s unwillingness to help us create jobs in this country.”

Of course, not every Republican seems to have gotten the memo.

Case in point: Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), perhaps the leading critic of climate change science in Congress, took to the Senate floor this week to challenge Obama’s climate proposals as well as the entire notion that the Earth is warming. In a speech Wednesday he cited the “Climategate” controversy, which involved conservatives’ accusations that scientists around the world are falsifying their research to make it appear that temperatures are rising.

At a hearing last week, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) challenged Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz on the idea that the globe is warming, with the lawmaker contending that “the temperature has stayed steady for 16 years now.”

“That’s in dispute,” countered Moniz, a nuclear physicist and a former energy lab director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Indeed, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show an overall trend of rising temperatures. In January, NOAA reported that 2012 had been the warmest year on record in the lower 48 states, and that globally it was the 10th-warmest since record-keeping began in 1880.

In April, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) alluded to Genesis to make the point that not everyone believes climate change is man-made.

“I would point out that if you’re a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood is an example of climate change, and that certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy,” he said.

Other Republicans are happy to distance themselves from that kind of talk.

“I’m not a denier when it comes to whether or not we’re seeing a changing climate,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who has nonetheless challenged the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, said Wednesday. “I believe that we are.”

The Republican divide was evident during the 2012 presidential primary, in which former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum denounced climate science as “bogus” and mocked warnings about the “dangers” of carbon dioxide pollution. “Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is,” he said at an energy summit in March 2012.